Apparently This Puzzle Is NOT Perfect?!

[@vjtocco]

MaizeGator here. Thank you Simon for featuring my puzzle! This was indeed the first 9x9 puzzle I'd ever constructed, and it was more fun than I could have imagined. Having watched you solve so many puzzles over the past 3 years, it was surreal to see you solve mine. I am so happy that you liked it! By the way, my favorite moment of your solve was deducing that R8C9 had to be island. As others have pointed out (and you discovered a few seconds later), the arrow in R8C8 being 2 was the faster way to see this, but the two arrows in this cell were added very late into the setting process. Although this circumvented the deduction, I thought it would make the Nurikabe portion more accessible to non-experts. Your way was actually the way I had originally intended!

[@FrancisFjordCupola]

And thank you for constructing such a puzzle! The amount of work that must go into such things...

[@thewhitetramp]

How is that your first puzzle? It's brilliant. I have never had so much fun doing a solve!

[@SonSafeSpace]

Excellent puzzle, absolutely amazing! I would like to suggest that for the rules, stating “all island clues are shown” if we’re meant to know that every island piece MUST connect to a clue. I hope this makes sense! Basically I wasn’t sure if every island clue meant that these were all the islands in the puzzle or if I could create islands that didn’t contain a clue at all

[@jpryan90]

​@@SonSafeSpace I'm a little lost. An island unconnected to a clue violates the rule that every island must connect to exactly one numbered clue.

[@enigma-mixed5933]

Thank you Maiseagator. Not just for the puzzle but for actually stopping the purple water madness that has taken over Simons brain. Last puzzle he debated using the obvious green and blue and then talked himself out of it. Then ... then... then what did he do... He then used blue for land and green for water as a place holder. I'm amazed I didn't turn the video off. I was ready for Simon to override the rules and go purple... hopefully this puzzle is going to be the start of his recovery

[@Arcessitor]

I like how the rules pre-empted simon creating a purple ocean and grey land again.

[@stevesebzda570]

That's how it should be (to steer him), because some of that can get wacky lol

[@stevesebzda570]

I just saw though, 8:12 . It didn't stop Simon from using that horrid *dark* green, that ya can't see the pencilmarks in. They didn't sto0 'im from that!?! Lol 😮😅

[@CharlesGregory]

I came to write this but thankfully the top 4 comments are saying the exact same thing!

[@stevesebzda570]

Frankly, I'm using light brown for the islands. Water can be green sometimes (Aqua marine, is blueish green - along with algae water -- and olive oil water in other puzzles). I vote "brown" for islands (soil-covered rock to start with), that's what I'm using. ;) 😅 CORRECTION: *algae water (I don't know why I said algefied lol)

[@KinkyTurtle]

@@stevesebzda570 I used yellow. My islands are very sandy.

[@S_Black]

Thank you for specifying the color of water and islands in the rules.

[@celestia7411]

shoutout to the constructor for specifically clarifying that water should be blue and land should be green , we all know that Simon loves his blue land and orange water when left to his own devices :P

[@simsplayer9952]

This is because most colorblind can tell the difference between blue and orange. You could have the island as Orange (sand) and the water as Blue.

[@darthrainbows]

@@simsplayer9952 Simon has, in the past, made water orange and land blue.

[@S_Black]

@@simsplayer9952 It's not just that. He once made hedges gray and paths green

[@PassionPopsicle]

"Let's make the water green" - never again! This is how you know you're a big deal in the sudoku world: setters make rules based solely on your odd colour choices!

[@J7Handle]

They didn’t specify the islands, color, however. I made them desert yellow. Curaçao style islands I suppose. It just contrasts slightly better with the blue.

[@-mir85-36]

@@J7Handle "Shade the remaining cells green" :)

[@chocolateboy300]

I finished in 77 minutes. It turns out that I like nurikabe puzzles. The flow of the pathway was so good. This ruleset has an interesting limitation where a sweet spot exists for different ranges of numbers. I had a lot of fun calculating them at the beginning. I think my favorite part were the cells in r4c4 and r4c8 creating a break between the two water sections if chosen in the wrong order. It turns out that I like nurikabe puzzles. Great Puzzle!

[@chitraagarwal8259]

I think this puzzle will get likes just for specifying the colors Simon should use!

[@cooperleher10]

I loved this one, MaizeGator! It was just the right difficulty level for me. All of the a-ha moments were delightful. I loved how at the very beginning the 34 cage taught me the new mechanic in a relatively straightforward/simple way before the other cages asked me to apply the mechanic in more complex ways. I love that design - simple introduction of a new mechanic followed by more complex use of the mechanic. Thank you!

[@vjtocco]

I love to hear this. This was my exact intention for difficulty level.

[@antoniag8146]

simon and mark, ive been watching your videos like crazy lately! it's currently exam season for me, i'm a maths/computer science undergrad who's always loved puzzles and i love your content so much :) thank you for keeping me company while i'm studying and of course thank you for the wonderful high quality content! your calming presence and logical thinking makes my day

[@nathanmenezes7914]

lol me too, helps distract from exams for a bit

[@longwaytotipperary]

Good luck on your exams!

[@panoskatrin4910]

U r soo cutee!!!❤

[@janerobson2297]

O Simon. Your ability to ignore the 1 on the arrow in box 8 for so long and resolving the 150 and 48 islands in a much more complicated way! Never change!

[@coconuts2513]

Thank you to MaizeGator for specifically putting in the rules that water is blue and islands are green. We all know that Simon likes to choose outrageous colours when left to his own devices 😂😂😂😂

[@dontdreamon9026]

Hi Simon, thank you for the sweet birthday wishes. Ctc on zoom works very nicely. Warm greetings, Annemarie

[@BijickY]

Just a thank you for the consistent uploads. ❤I already know it’ll be great.

[@pimpreekt]

A debut for the comments! Thank you so much for all your beautiful logic and dry humour. Love it!

[@MarushiaDark316]

I'm guessing the title is a reference to the movie Moana since "How Far I'll Go" is a song about leaving an island to explore the ocean.

[@vjtocco]

Precisely it! I have a two-year old son who loves it, so it's always stuck in my head.

[@MattYDdraig]

38:00 This was delightful and filled with surprising twists and turns. The 150 cage had me torn between two possibilities that didn't want to resolve for ages until they did... Into a third option. Great puzzle.

[@grimsqueaker5333]

Hope your talk went well Simon. I love your content, and even look forward to your unexpected colour choices.

[@praematura]

This was a really cool puzzle, solved in 27:00. Simon's solve path differed slightly from mine, and a few things he deduced in a simpler way than I did, though there were a few places where the opposite was true. Many thanks to MaizeGator for a very cool puzzle!

[@HunterJE]

16:20 If it makes you feel any better, the 1 was placeable by cage logic BEFORE r8c9 was colored green by clue reachability and 2x2 logic, so actually that _is_ the "much easier way"

[@emilywilliams3237]

I missed watching this when it went up two days ago, but I knew that I had to return to it as soon as I could. This was because it is nurikabe, which I know that you love, Simon, and also, frankly, to see whether you actually used blue and green in the color scheme! Very interesting puzzle and solve, and I kind of have the feeling that I might be able to solve this one. I will put it on the possibility list. I will have your video to hand, though, because I am sure I will need your help.

[@titusadduxas]

51:30 - That was brilliant. Gorgeous logic.

[@Xelopheris]

29:20 - Easier way to think of it is that R5C8 or R6C7 is land, so R5C7 cannot be land or it would connect the 48 and a 150. It's always water, so the 48 clue definitely has to expand left, which means the 30 clue can't expand right.

[@Ramhams1337]

some logic i found (i think) is that at 17:45 where you deduce that the 150 clue has atleast 1 island extending further because of the 1 arrow. does that not also mean that the cell to the right of 48 clue has to be water by that logic alone. since if it was island you would be connecting to islands to eachother regardless of where the island piece from the 150 clue ends up?

[@vjtocco]

That was my intended deduction, yes. It is the same "classic Nurikabe trick" that Simon mentions at 13:10. But Simon's way is beautiful and valid also!

[@RichSmith77]

At 36:35, if r7c9 is a 5 then you cannot re-use 5 in a 4,5 pair for the extra 9 needed. 5 could have been ruled out at this stage.

[@frankjiang1857]

Finished in 37:03. Interesting ruleset. I initially made the wrong assumption about the arrows twice, but it was easy to see how it couldn't work for either way. Once I had the correct rules in places, it flowed well. Fun puzzle!

[@johnh2052]

At 36:44, Simon considered whether R7C8 in the 150 cage could be a 5, and noted that the two remaining digits on the island would have to be a 45-pair. I waited in vain for the "But that doesn't work..." Would have saved some trouble there. :)

[@57thorns]

At 14:47 an alternative way is to look at row 8, both candidates for iisland pointed to from r8c8 would have to be water.

[@kayleighlehrman9566]

Maverick waiting until nearly 23 minutes in, really off their piloting game today

[@Mich-lu8bt]

Who is maverick??

[@natarod2839]

@@Mich-lu8bta plane im buessing, bc of the noise around 31:05

[@davidstorrs]

At 46:26, why couldn't the island that starts in r3c3 have been the same 3 cell shape but with 912? Simon placed the 1 shortly thereafter but at the time it seemed like a valid play. What did I miss?

[@vjtocco]

912 would be 3 cells, therefore the clue would have to be 36

[@davidstorrs]

@@vjtocco Aha! Right you are, thank you.

[@letMeSayThatInIrish]

​@@davidstorrs I made the exact same mistake and came here to see if anyone else had mentioned it. And for the fifty-eleventh time I'm reminded that Simon rarely makes mistakes while my brain is made of silly putty 😆

[@davidstorrs]

@@letMeSayThatInIrish Oh, I knew perfectly well that I had gotten it wrong, I simply wasn't sure why. :> I'm always amazed at Simon's and Mark's ability to make these intuitive leaps to the correct question, and then to draw amazing deductions from those questions.

[@iabervon]

You can actually see the roping at 41:34. Where are 8, 9, and r7c9 in box 6? They're not in column 9, because that sees them from box 9. 8 and r7c9 can't repeat in the same island, and 9 doesn't fit on the island. So they're all in column 7, which is slightly helpful at this point.

[@RichSmith77]

This is a step in the right direction, but next we need a constructor to specify the RGB values required for the islands and water, so that Simon uses a lighter shade of blue and green. 🙂

[@johnh2052]

At 17:50, Simon figured out the arrow in R7C6 had to be a one, but missed the very normal trick that he used elsewhere in the puzzle several times. This means that R5C7 is water, which helps determine the state of the 48 island.

[@angec9908]

Forcing Simon to use blue for water and green for land?! Tsk. Such a shame. I know he wanted to use grey and purple 😂

[@efa666]

Have you ever used a Flight Tracker to see where Maverick is going every day?

[@Esperi74]

@38:00 you need 14 to make the island add to 25 using three digits from 3457. 3+4+5+7 = 19, so the 5 must be the missing digit.

[@MatthewBouyack]

I think this is the first day in four years of watching the channel that I solved a Mark puzzle faster than Mark and a Simon puzzle faster than Simon! 46:05 for me! I'll just forget about that puzzle yesterday that took me 4.5 hours... 😅

[@ryanoftinellb]

Very nice puzzle and a joy to solve.

[@themuffin437]

39:37 for me, a beautiful puzzle with a really fun rule set

[@timotab]

33:13 Simon talks about how the maths precludes the island being 7 or 8 cells big, completely ignoring the 1 in R7C6 that forces R6C7 to be water, blocking the island in at 6 cells.

[@RichSmith77]

(I was looking at the wrong timestamp. You already had r5c8 as the 1 island cell seen by the 1 in r7c6. Sorry. I deleted my original comment.)

[@piarittersporn]

What a brilliant puzzle.

[@bobh6728]

At 24:15 he says the max is 6, then marks it 2,3,4,5. Why not 6?

[@vjtocco]

Because of water connectivity. If that arrow was a 6, water on the left could not join water on the right.

[@kennethjfair]

@@vjtocco No, it could join up. The problem is the water in r4c6; if the arrow cell were a 6, then both r4c5 and r4c7 would be land, completely surrounding the water in r4c6.

[@RichSmith77]

There was a reason available, but it was very odd that Simon didn't give one. It had the appearance of being a slip-up, but a strange one. Edit: He doesn't use the pencil-marked options, so it doesn't affect the solve. Still odd though.

[@johnpauladamovsky86]

Goodness Gracious...! I nominate Simon Anthony to be a local magistrate.

[@RichSmith77]

At 40:10, I had another way of seeing that r1c5 couldn't be island. If it was island, the 1 clue in r4c8 would be satisfied, making r2c6 water, sealing off the ? island as size 1. Neither of the other two islands (r2c2 & r2c8) could grow enough to connect to r1c5, leaving it as an island without a clue.

[@oligarkhia1]

Simon "Otherwise people would not have liked that (green for land and blue for water)". Comments Section: "Thank God the constructor made Simon use those colours" 😆

[@bobblebardsley]

*files **_Cracking the Crepe-tic_** under 'Pancake Day ideas'*

[@grimsqueaker5333]

Ooh, that does sound good. In my country pancakes refer to a more crepe- like product dusted with cinnamon sugar when warm and rolled up like a log. Bonus points if you add a squeeze of lemon over the top. It is especially popular on rainy days and always sold at church fêtes. We even have food trucks that specialize in cinnamon sugar pancakes.

[@estherwestbroek]

Where is it, I'm coming over!

[@grimsqueaker5333]

@@estherwestbroek South Africa

[@estherwestbroek]

@@grimsqueaker5333 Aha, it's a bit far for now, but I have a South African friend over here who has her grandmothers' cookbook. Bound to be in there and we could have a fun time trying them!

[@Arcessitor]

36:09 for me, definitely a puzzle that makes you feel smart if you find things.

[@Gonzalo_Garcia_]

18:35 for me. Fantastic puzzle, very enjoyable!

[@srwapo]

41:08, found it a bit hard to keep track of everything, thought I broke the 150 cage because I didn't think it could be six cells long, but I guess my math is bad.

[@-mir85-36]

Same thing happened to me lol

[@grahamania]

01:05:26 for me. Not too happy with my time, but extremely happy with the puzzle! Well done on creating a great puzzle. Kind comment.

[@dikinebaks]

51:20 I was so focused on islands, I keep forgetting about sea rules😂

[@ianoz1]

Crashed until I realised one of the islands could be bigger than 5 digits.

[@iceberg54321]

At least the water wasn't purple.

[@michaelmatter1222]

Great puzzle by CornCroc 🙃🥳

[@MaxPower2719]

I wanted to thank MaizeGator for specifying the colours, but then I glanced at the comments and noticed almost every comment mentions this 😂 Still, thank you, MaizeGator 👍

[@Manigo1743]

Wow, he uses blue for water. That's a twist.

[@fernandosfiore]

Does anyone know how he’s able to stream many different puzzles like that? What type of tool or application does he use to be able to do that?

[@anaayoung9142]

Yes! Blue for water and green for land!! Hehe 😅

[@michaelpdawson]

I got all the way through and ended up with a valid sudoku solution, but it was wrong because of a stupid addition error in one of my islands. Fortunately I was able to quickly rewind and correct the error.

[@debrawilden1971]

(I'm late to this party, but I think the rules were confusing, then Simon says, "I don't understand." Better stated for the # clues would have been: That clue is the sum of the digits in the island x the # of digits in the island.)

[@HunterJE]

So is there any reason for the "single, double, or triple digit" qualifier in the instructions? It's not restrictive, since the lowest possible island clue is one digit (1*1=1) and the highest is three (45*9=405), and while I guess it could be disambiguating from the occasional puzzle type where ?s represent individual digits feels like "a ? represents any number" on its own does that job just as well...

[@timotab]

Given how pedantic some people can be (even to the point of claiming that a puzzle has no solution with rules as written, even though the intended interpretation is one any reasonable person would make), over specifying rules is sometimes needed. Certainly the Rules As Written here leave no doubt that it's not restrictive.

[@vjtocco]

I've solved a few other puzzles that use two question marks for double-digit numbers. As Timotab mentioned, I wanted to err on the side of absolutely clear.

[@stevieinselby]

For a guess, to avoid any confusion between "number" and "digit".

[@stephenmccarthy1795]

I am always wondering if he is going to finish up before resorting to sudoku. In this case the last island needed finishing. It is disappointing if sudoku could finish the puzzle without finishing the islands.

[@jurgenbaumann67]

It can´t be a 10-island cause you only have 9 different digits. 32:59 - "Exactly one of these digits has to be island." (marked both with cursor), true, but why didn´t you marked it? One is island, the other can´t be reached by 24 or 30, and only can be reached by "?" if the other is also island. 48 minutes... I needed 2 and a half our, I am so slow. I like your videos, but I needed them 30 years ago. Would have learned to listen AND understand english much better.

[@six_5000]

I gave up after 2 hours but a few days later I tried again with fresh eyes 187:43

[@zachnichols8642]

35:29 nice

[@zirco77]

Not watched the video yet and not read the comments either to avoid any spoiler (so sorry if tons of other people said the same thing): will Simon really use blue for water? [dramatic music]

[@longwaytotipperary]

Hope your speech went well! I’m sure it did!

[@timvermeulen4024]

Wouldn't it be possible under these rules for some of the clued cells to be water? They'd be meaningless without any island to refer to, but that's not unheard of for pencil puzzles (see e.g. Yajisan-Kazusan).

[@ezracohen6020]

Could theoretically work for the ?, but for anything else you are multiplying by the size of the island to get the clue so the fact that they aren’t 0 proves that they are at least one cell big

[@timvermeulen4024]

@@ezracohen6020 That part of the rules states that each island contains a clue which has that property, but not, seemingly, that that property necessarily holds for each individual clue.

[@ezracohen6020]

@@timvermeulen4024 I can see how you could read it that way, but in the context of rules I don’t think that would be the correct way to read it, the purpose of the rules is to explain the different properties of the puzzle in the order that is the most sensible such that all information is given with enough context to be understood with minimal repetition, first it explains water and then a restriction to how it can be placed, then land and a restriction to how it can be placed, now that the restriction for the land has been mentioned there is enough context to go into the relevant rules for how that restriction functions, they are thus separate rules and the word “which” should be interpreted as referring to clue cells in general rather than clue cells in an island, to not interpret it that way would require some explicit mention of how they should be treated if they aren’t in an island even if the answer is to just treat them as meaningless

[@stevieinselby]

One thing that never ceases to amaze me in the comments section are the people who try to come up with the most implausible misreading of the rules just to make a niggling point about grammar 🙄

[@timvermeulen4024]

@@stevieinselby There's no need to make such accusations, I genuinely got stuck on this when attempting the puzzle myself. 😕 Rulesets almost never leave any room for interpretation, so when something can't be inferred from the rules, it's usually not a valid deduction to make - I even mentioned Yajisan-Kazusan to illustrate that my "implausible misreading" isn't all that implausible

[@sacredsock8031]

There seems to have been a lot of multiplication recently

[@robertcousins2274]

37:52 for me

[@theredstoneengineer6934]

61:39 for me. 15 /= 10

[@alexliu8003]

blue numbers with blue and green background.......going to be blind😂😂😂

[@peterwsanders]

Gave up. Too many adverts